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Starting the Minimum Viable Telco (and OSS) movement

OSS has a bad name in certain circles (usually for failing to deliver on time / cost / functionality or being timely / costly to enhance). Despite all those factors, the real root-cause is almost always complexity (see here for a description of the triple constraint of OSS).

But it’s not just internal factors that influence complexity on OSS projects / operations. It’s also a raft of upstream, external factors that contribute, which I refer to as the OSS pyramid of pain. As a starting point, think about how complex our product offers (and bundles) are, which flow down into service designs, which flow down into orchestration chains, which…. And that’s not even mentioning all the superfluous or obsoleted stuff that nobody has ever taken the time to prune.

For the world of Telco (and OSS) to survive revenue curves that are falling off the cliff, there is an opportunity to align with that future reality by starting the Minimum Viable Telco (MVT) movement. If we took the perspective of start-ups, building Minimum Viable Products (MVP), do you think our Telco/OSS offerings might look just a little different than what we’re dealing with today?

The MVT movement can start small and local from within OSS. We can ensure our products are MVPs (internal influence) and can push hard to try to minimise the pyramid of pain hitting us (external influence). At a larger scale, it reaches out from the top of an organisation and spreads through Points of Interconnect (global influence).